A COMMUNITY worker who set up a Reading volunteer service has been forced to quit his post – after spiralling house prices forced him out of town.

Damian Brooks, 24, is just one of a growing number of people leaving the town because they cannot afford to live here. He has found buying a house on his £17,000 a year salary an impossible dream.

Mr Brooks, co-founder of Millennium Volunteers, said: “I’m having to leave because the cost of living is so expensive in Reading. You just can’t get value for money.”

His departure shows the flip side of the Thames Valley’s supposed dream package of low unemployment and high salaries and gives weight to a report published in yesterday’s Evening Post.

The report by the Institute of Public Policy Research revealed the true extent of the exodus from Reading by admitting that even a salary of £25,000 was not enough to keep or attract workers to the town because house prices were ridiculously high.

After six years in the town – he came here as a student at The University of Reading training to be a teacher – he is now sick of living in expensive rented accommodation, which last year found him paying £600 a month for a one-bedroom home in Lower Earley.

Mr Brooks said: “House prices have gone up and up in Reading. There should be a point when they come back down again, but I just can’t see that happening at the moment. It is nigh impossible to get on the housing ladder here.”

Now Mr Brooks and his fiancée Katy Barry are buying a property in the 24-year-old’s home county of Somerset, where he will start work as a youth justice worker at Somerset Youth Offending Team in August.

Mr Brooks successfully applied to run the Reading side of Millennium Volunteers with his friend Joe Green in 1999.

Since it started in October that year, the scheme has matched many wannabe volunteers aged 16 to 25 with projects needing help, and this week volunteer number 200 signed up to the scheme.

Mr Brooks said: “I don’t feel I am abandoning anything but I do feel attached to the project because I helped set it up.

“I don’t feel I have taken it as far as I can go – there’s a lot of scope for development.”

He leaves it in the capable hands of Mr Green.

“I just never expected to be leaving so soon,” he said, adding that the delights of The Oracle will keep him a regular visitor to the town.